We have recently shortlisted our future PACS vendor to either Fuji’s Synapse or Intelerad’s IntelePACS. Here are some of our findings between these two products thus far:

– Pre sales communication: Intelerad has been a delight to deal with. Questions have been answered quickly, and the general attitude we have been given has been positive. Fuji has been adequate with responses to questions, but not quick, and the feeling we have gotten from the sales people has not been as comfortable. Edge: Intelerad

– Viewer features: Fuji has a fuller feature set than Intelerad. They correctly display mammo images, and have better support for echo clips. The ability to move images between colour/greyscale monitors is nice. With the additional functionality, we have noticed increased complexity as a result for the end user. IntelePACS seems easier to use, and hopefully they maintain that as they fill out the feature set. Edge: Fuji

– Support: This is quite hard to judge solely from the pre-sales process, however, we do have some opinions on the matter. Intelerad has no on site support, everything is done remotely. Fuji does have a couple of service personal close by. Fuji seems more controlling, wanting to handle routine support items such as modality machine changes themselves, not letting the client have certain admin abilities. Intelerad continuously monitors the system for the client, allowing some proactive measures to be taken. For our needs, Intelerad has the better support offering. Edge: Intelerad

– Architecture: Given that we have multiple locations to deal with, Intelerad allows us to forward studies directly to the rad’s PC. Fuji lacks this ability. Both allow web viewing for our referring doctors. Having IntelePACS run on linux is nice from a disaster recovery/security perspective. Fuji could share a tape library with other servers, Intelerad monopolizes that hardware. Edge: Intelerad

– Demonstrations of product: The apps person from Intelerad had a good grasp of the product, and worked through the demo’s in a consistent and straightforward manner. Fuji’s demo was more ad hoc. Questions that the apps person could not answer were answered in a followup with Intelerad. Fuji never did address such questions. Fuji setup a full fledged environment with 2 greyscale/1 colour monitor. Intelerad used a couple of colour monitors. Edge: Intelerad

There are certainly more criteria to evaluate PACS on. However, this summary is a partial view of our process thus far.

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